Special education of uzbekistan karshi state university the faculty of roman-german philology

1.2. Jane Austen’s life and creative activity.

Jane Austen, who was a pure English writer, was bom in 1775 on 16^th December at Steventon.. She is the author of magnificent novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.

Much is connected with Jane Austen's name for each formed Englishman: “books which he has once read and likes to re-read, representation about perfection of the form, images of heroes which he recollects, learning their speech or habits in the people living today”¹. Jane Austen’s influence on English writers-realists of the XIX century was huge. She was esteemed by great artists and critics to be referred, and was suggested to be studied. Some writers held up her creations as an example, others as the sample of realistic skill. Others just rejected her works. Up to our days English literary critics, studying this or that of classics of realism of XlX-the century, compare it to Austen. Art of Austen demands special conversation and any special definitions, but - that is already indisputable, and to this belief it is time to come, - without Austen there is no English realism of the XIX century.
It is difficult to disagree with Walton Litz (USA) writing in the monograph about Austen: “We name her the first modem the English novelist because she was the first prose writer who synthesized by Fielding and Richardson, thereby anticipating classical images of the XIX century, that method which have allowed artists to reflect both a course of external events and all complexity of individual impressions and perceptions of the person”.
Austen was bom in a family of a provincial priest, and spent her life in a rural solitude - and a life in which there were neither storms, nor shocks - that frameworks of her existence were limited by a place of Steventon in Hampshire, and then Chouton in Kent. To say that is obviously incorrect. Proceeding from similar representation about public relations of the author of Pride and prejudice, it is possible to misunderstand its creativity. George Austen, father of Jane Austen, had a scientific degree received at the Oxford University, and, for a number of years he was a member of a scientific corporation of one of his colleges. He differentiated the big erudition, mind and a breadth of vision. As for Jane’s mother she belonged to ancient surnames of a noble family. The Austen’s accessory to well-born nobility caused a circle of acquaintances and family communications. People named their house the "best" house of a county. When Austen started to write, she represented people whom she knew "from within". Jane was not a hypocrite: her correspondence speaks about a keen interest in high society life and even at times in that chatter successfully nicknamed her by Englishman a “small talk”. Her uncommon talent didn’t rush anybody to suspect about her talents, even when her novels didn’t being published.
Austen lived her entire life as a part of a small and close-knit family located on the lower fringes of English gentry. She was educated by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to Austen’s development as a professional writer. Austen’s artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period, she experienced with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried and then abandoned, and wrote extensively, revised three major novels and began the fourth. She was able to finish six big novels from 1811 until 1816: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both were published posthumously in 1818. She began the third, which was eventually titled Saditon, but she died before completing it.
Austen’s works critique the novels of sensibility represent the second half of the 18 century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism. The plot of Austen’s novels, though fundamentally comic, highlights the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Samuel Johnson, one of the strongest influences on her writing, states that her works are concerned with moral issues. During Austen’s lifetime, her works brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews, because she chose to publish anonymously. Through the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired mainly by members of the literary elite. However, the publication of her nephew’s A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a far wider public as an appealing personality and kindled popular interest in her works. By the 1940, Austen had become widely accepted in academia as a “great English writer”. The second half of the twentieth century sees a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explores many aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical. Austen’s parents, William George Austen (1731-1805), and his wife, Cassandra (1739-1827), were members of substantial gentry families. George was descended from a family of woolen manufacturers which had risen through the professions to the lower ranks of the landed gentry.
Cassandra was a member of the prominent Leigh family. George Austen served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon, Hampshire and nearby village from 1773 until 1801. It brought good changes in Jane’s life. From 1773 until 1796, he supplemented this income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time who boarded at his home. Jane Austen’s family was large: six brothers - James (1765- 1819), George (1766-1838), Edward (1767-1852), Henry Thomas (1771- 1850), Francis William (1774-1865), Charles John (1779-1882)- and one sister, Cassandra Elizabeth (1773-1845).² She was Jane’s closest friend, and she liked Jane very much, but she died unmarried. Austen felt closest to Henry among her brothers, who became a banker and, after his bank failed, he became an Anglican clergyman. Henry was also his sister’s literary agent. His large circle of friends and acquaintances in London included bankers, merchants, publishers, painters, and actors: he provided Austen with a view of social worlds not normally visible from a small parish in rural Hampshire. Austen’s mother placed Austen after several month of her birth with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby, who nursed and raised Austen for a year or eighteen months. In 1783, according to the family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs. Ann Cawley and they moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Austen was subsequently educated at home, until leaving for boarding school with her sister Cassandra early in 1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music, perhaps drama also. Jane and Cassandra had returned home by the end of 1786, because the Austen’s couldn’t afford to send both of their daughters to school.
Austen continued her education by reading books in her family library. Jane’s father and brothers James and Henry guided her. George Austen apparently gave his daughters unfettered access to his large and varied library, and he provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing. According to Park Honan, a biographer of Austen, life in the Austen’s home was lived in “an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere”³ where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed. After returning from school in 1786, Jane Austen never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment. Private theatricals were also a part of Austen’s education. When she was seven until she was thirteen, the family and close friends staged a series of different plays, including Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick’ Bon Ton. Austen certainly joined in these activities, as a spectator at first and as a participant when she was older.
Most of the plays were comedies, which suggested one way in which Austen’s comic and satirical gifts were cultivated. It encouraged Austen to start writing novels and short stories. She used to think about heroes and heroines in her future works, when her friends were acting on the stage. Perhaps as early as 1787, Austen began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her family amusement. Austen later compiled “fair copies” of 29 of these early works into three bound notebooks, now it is called as the Juvenilia, containing pieces originally written between 1787 and 1793. There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as the period 1809- 1811 and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814. Among these works are satirical novels in letters titled Love and Friendship, in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility, and the history of England, a manuscript of 34 pages accompanied by 13 watercolor miniatures by her sister Cassandra. Austen’s history parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England (1764). Austen wrote, for example: “Henry the 4 ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin and predecessor Richard the 2^nd, to resign it to him, and to retire for the rest of his life to Pomfiret Castle, where he happened to be murdered.”⁵
Austen’s Juvenilia is often, according to the scholar Richard Jenkyns, “boisterous” and “anarchic”; he compares them to the work of eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne and the twentieth- century comedy group Monty Python. When Austen started growing into adulthood, she continued to live at her parent’s home, carrying out those activities normal for her age and social standing: she practiced the pianoforte, assisted her sister and mother with supervising servants, and attended female relatives during childbirth and older relatives on their deathbed. She sent short pieces of writing to her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine, Jane and Anna Elizabeth. Austen was particularly proud of her accomplishments as a seamstress. She also attended church regularly, socialized frequently with friends and neighbors, and read novels - often of her own composition - aloud with her family in the evenings. Socializing with the neighbors often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone’s home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that “Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it”.
Austen began her short play Sir Charles or The Happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts in 1793, and could complete it around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgments of Austen’s favorite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Gradison (1753), by Samuel Richardson. Honan speculates that at some point not long after writing Love and Friendship in 1789, Austen decided to “write for profit, to make stories her central effort”, that is, to become a professional writer. Whenever she made that decision, beginning in about 1793, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works. Between 1793 and 1795, Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. It’s unlike any of Austen’s other works. Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin describes the heroine of the novel as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray, and abuse her victims, whether lovers, friends or family. Tomalin writes: “Told in letters, it is a neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration It stands alone in Austen’s work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters”⁶.
Austen experienced at least two potential romances in her short life, despite she never married. Austen had a flirtation with Tom Lefroy, later Lord High Justice of Ireland. She wrote two letters to her lovely sister Cassandra mentioning about him. She wrote:
“After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove - it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admire of Jones, and therefore wears the same colored clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded”.
On 16 January 1796, there is another mention:
“Friday - at length the day is come on which I am to flirt with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at themelancholy idea”.¹ There was not serious relationship with him, and the love affair didn’t last long. However, many critics state that Austen might have had him in mind when she created the character Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen successfully published four novels, which were generally well-received during her life at Chawton. Her brother Henry helped to the publication of Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in October 1811. Reviews were favorable and the novel became popular among critics and readers, the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen’s earnings from this novel provided her with some financial and psychological independence. Egerton published successfully other works of Austen besides the second edition of Mansfield Park. Austen admired poet Walter Scott even she couldn’t know him as a novalist yet. His first novel appeared two years prior to her death. Austen stared to judge intelligently and almost professionally, both writers of the past, and about the modem literature. The father and brother have imparted her thin literary taste, and she unmistakably distinguished fine from trivial and trite. As a literary teacher, Austen highly appreciated Kaupera Krebba and very much willingly read M.Edzhuort and W.Scott.
Austen knew that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent’s librarian invited Austen to visit the Prince’s London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Actually, Austen didn’t like him; she could hardly refuse the request. She later wrote Plan of the Novel, according to hints from various quartes. The librarian gave many suggestions for a future Austen’s novel. In mid-1815, Austen changed her publisher to John Murry, who was a better known publisher in London. He could successfully publish Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816.
Emma sold well but the new edition of Mansfield Park didn’t well, and this failure offset most of the profits Austen earned on Emma. These were the last of Austen’s novels to be published during her lifetime. While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austen began to write a new novel The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She finished her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen’ bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and losing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.
Austen began to feel unwell at the beginning of 1816. At first, she tried not to pay attention to her illness seriously, and continued to work. By the middle of that year her physical condition started going worse, but Austen continued to work in spite of her illness. She was dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots and rewrote the final two chapters, finishing them on 6 August in 1816. In January 1817, she again started working on a new novel called The Brothers, later titled Sanditon. She hardly completed twelve chapters before stopping her work in mid- March 1817, because her illness prevented her from continuing. By mid- April, Austen was confined to her bed. In May, her brother Henry escorted Jane and Cassandra to Winchester for medical treatment. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. Henry arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the Winchester Cathedral.
The majorities of Austen’s biographers rely on Dr. Vincent Cope’s tentative 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison’s disease. However, her final illness has also been described as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, later other medics states that Austen likely died of bovine tuberculosis, a disease commonly associated with drinking unpasteurized( nor boiled well) milk..
Jane Austen’s big novels are: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1813), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818) and the last novel Persuasion (1818). She also wrote short fictions: Lady Susan (1794, 1805), The Watsons (1804), Sadison (1817).